Join us in opposing Copperwood's Air Pollution Permit

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Visitors come from around the state, country, and world to visit the North Country Trail, the Porcupine Mountains, and Lake Superior specifically for the sake of breathing fresh, clean air.  But Michigan's environmental regulatory agency EGLE applies a "one-size-fits-all" template to permitting. Should the same standards be applied to an area people come to specifically for clean air as to a place that no one visits, or to a place which is already contaminated? Should not the unique needs of the outdoor recreation economy and wilderness experience be considered? Should not also the wellbeing of this region's sensitive old growth ecology be taken into account?

One of the exhaust vents would be just 150 feet from Porcupine Mountains State Park. But in 316 pages, the company's permit application makes ZERO mentions of outdoor recreation or the ecology of this area. The only mentions of the Porcupine Mountains and Lake Superior are as items on a map, and the North Country Trail is not mentioned even once. The applicant is approaching the project as though it existed in a void, rather than immediately adjacent to one of the most beloved state parks in the entire country.

The applicant should be required to resubmit an application which takes full consideration of outdoor recreation and this area's unique ecology.

Because there is no air quality monitor near the Mine Site, the baseline data — which is used to predict the impacts of emissions — has been collected from two points: Horicon Wildlife Refuge and the Forest County Potawatomi Reservation, both of which are a hundred miles or more to the south. While these locations no doubt have relatively clean air compared to New York City, they are still surrounded by much greater human populations, far more traffic, and far more development than the area in question. Remember that the proposed Copperwood Mine Site is in the buffer zone of mainland Michigan's largest Wilderness Area; there is no power grid; there are no developments; there are no permanent human residents within several miles; apart from moderate traffic to the State Park down humble County Road 519, there are no sources of emissions.

Meanwhile, the Horicon Wildlife Refuge air monitor location is just sixty miles from Milwaukee, with a population of 1.5 million people. It is situated between busy highways, and it is surrounded on all sides by industrial farmland, from which agricultural chemicals surely travel on the wind. Is this really an appropriate proxy for the air quality of a place with no human residents next to old growth wilderness on the pristine shore of Lake Superior? The permit should be rejected for the inclusion of this data alone; no projections made using Horicon as a baseline can be considered reliable.

The Forest County Potawatomi is surely superior, but that too is a far cry from an uninhabited area. The Reservation's own website states: "While, the quality of the airshed over Reservation lands in Forest County has been considered pristine, pollutants from industry in more populated areas located upwind travel and have been picked up in the data collected at the air site."

Although EGLE has stated that baseline data from an industrial area is "to the mining company's detriment" since it adds pollution to their projections, this is because impacts are calculated cumulatively rather than as a percent change. Measuring percentage change over the actual baseline is crucial in calculating the real impact to air, not just impacts in relation to an arbitrary standard. The mining company should be required to install an Air Quality Monitor in the immediate area before reapplying for the permit. EGLE must quantify air pollution impacts not just as cumulative change but as a percent change over baseline.

Without appropriate baseline data, none of the projected emissions can be trusted, and thus the permit should be rejected.

According to EGLE, "The Air Quality Division does not operate air monitoring stations in Gogebic County, however, the AQD does have a nearby monitoring station in Negaunee Township near Marquette, Michigan. The Negaunee Township station measures PM2.5."

Presumably, the baseline data currently being collected from Horicon and Forest County Potawatomi will eventually be collected from the Negaunee air monitor. This monitor's location is about as abysmal a proxy for a pristine wilderness area as can be imagined: it is within a quarter-mile of a dump and septic treatment plant; it is within a quarter-mile of a rail terminal; it is within a quarter-mile of a power generation station; it is only a mile away from one of the busiest stretches of highway in the Western Upper Peninsula. 

The current Air Permit should be rejected until EGLE has require Highland Copper to pay for the installation of a permanent, real-time air data station at the project site.

The modeling and projections for the permit were provided by Foth Infrastructure.

Foth also provided the projections for the Flambeau Mine. Unfortunately, their models did not match reality, since the actual mine resulted in 58x more copper contamination, 47x more iron contamination,  76x more manganese contamination, and twice as much sulfate contamination as predicted in their permits.

Foth has proven similarly incompetent with regards to modeling for  the proposed Back Forty Mine.

Judge Pulter, the Administrative Law Judge in a wetlands lawsuit case against the mining company, concluded  "as a matter of fact, that Aquila's computer groundwater model does not provide a reliable identification of wetland impacts, particularly those related to groundwater drawdown due to pit dewatering." (p. 29 of the Final Decision and Order of the contested case on Aquila's wetland permit, January 4, 2021).

The trial testimony from Eric Chatterson, the geology specialist within the Groundwater Permits Unit for the EGLE's Water Resources Division (WRD) was highly critical of Foth's faulty computer model. He stated that the model "wasn't really built to answer as far as I could tell any questions about the wetland."  He stated that Foth "predetermined what was going to happen and it just manipulated the mathematics to make that happen." 

In other words, Foth's wetland analysis was a deliberate fraud with no credible science to support their conclusion about harm to wetlands.

Should we really be trusting a discredited company with modeling the contamination for an operation in unprecedented proximity to both the Porcupine Mountains and Lake Superior?

The air dispersal modeling does not provide distances (page 262), so we cannot judge the impacts to the outdoor recreation areas or sensitive ecological areas.

However, considering that lead emissions from Ancient Roman mining can be studied in the ice of Greenland 2800 miles away, it is inconceivable that contaminants would not reach the North Country Trail, the Porcupine Mountains, and Lake Superior, all in extreme proximity.

 EGLE’s policy states that noise and light impacts cannot be considered in the context of an Air Permit. Such a policy is woefully at odds with the reality that introducing significant sources of light and noise in this virgin area could be disruptive both to the unique old growth ecology and to the outdoor recreation experience of visitors. Please consider that the Marquette County Eagle Mine’s exhaust vent creates a disconcerting din which can be heard for miles in the distance; research shows that woodland birds quickly depopulate an area which is disturbed by noise; people come to this area from far and wide specifically seeking peace and quiet.
 

Given that EGLE currently has no notion of Noise Permits or Light Permits, if these issues cannot be addressed in the context of other permits, then when? EGLE should revise their protocol to take full account of ambient impacts in sensitive areas.

Allowing Copperwood to advance requires rolling out the power grid 25 miles into a virgin landscape in the bufferzone of the North Country Trail, Lake Superior, and the Porcupine Mountains — no less than mainland Michigan's largest Wilderness Area. Long after Copperwood boards up shop in 10.7 years, the continued presence of the power grid and other infrastructure will lay the foundation for more development for decades to come. The cumulative impacts of all this industry will degrade the air quality of this pristine area far more than is accounted for in EGLE's permitting paradigm.